1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an electronic camera in which image information obtained by an image pickup device is electrically processed and recorded on a recording medium.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In certain types of conventional cameras using silver halide photographic materials, photographic data is recorded on the recording medium in addition to object image information. With such conventional cameras, only the data of photographing can be optically recorded as superposed on the object image information, and it is extremely difficult to record various other data such as shutter speed, aperture value, frame number, place of photographing, name of photographer and object, on the same recording medium on which the object image information is recorded. However, it would be very convenient for the purpose of later reproduction of image information or arrangement of recording media to record the above-mentioned data on the same recording medium on which the image information of the object is recorded.
Further, in the reproduction (for example, printing) of the image information recorded by use of the above-described conventional cameras using silver halide photographic materials, it is a general practice to compensate for the color temperature or the like so as to achieve image reproduction as precisely as possible. However, because the compensation must be conducted by presuming a compensation value based on the image information recorded on the recording medium, it is difficult to precisely reproduce the iamge information and, in spite of steady improvements being made in compensation theory, it still often happens that the presumed value is completely wrong. To eliminate the disadvantage of the conventional system and obtain a precisely reproduced image, it would be effective to record the data necessary for image reproduction processing on the same recording medium on which the object image information is recorded and to reproduce the image information by compensation based on the recorded compensation data. As described above, however, it is impossible with conventional cameras using silver halide photographic materials to record the data necessary for image reproduction processing on the same recording medium on which the image information is recorded.
More recently, an attempt has been made to develop an electronic camera using an image pickup device such as a charge coupled device (CCD), pickup tube or the like. In the electronic camera, the light information is once converted to an electric signal by the image pickup device, and the obtained electric signal is then recorded on a recording medium such as magnetic tape. Accordingly, with the electronic camera, it is possible to easily record various kinds of data on the same recording medium on which the object image information is recorded, by converting the data to electric signals. Further, even if all of the various kinds of data exemplified above are input into the system, the quantity of the electric signals converted from them is very small compared with that of the electric signals converted from the object image information. For example, all of the above-mentioned data can be recorded with a signal quantity corresponding to between several picture elements and several tens of picture elements of the digitized object image information. This level of signal quantity is obviously very small compared with the signal quantity of the object image information which generally converted into signals corresponding to between tens of thousands of picture elements and hundreds of thousands of picture elements. Further, because the photographing record data and/or the data for image reproduction processing are stored on the recording medium in the form of electric signals, these data can freely be indicated on the reproduced image and/or used at discretion to conduct processing, e.g. compensation, of the electric image signals. Accordingly, all data which are likely to be required later can be recorded on the recording medium.